The knock-down, drag-out brawl between Blaine County and the city of Hailey over how the bill for emergency dispatch services will be divvied up is evidence of something major gone wrong.
To steal a famous line from Cool Hand Luke, "What we've got here is failure to communicate."
The situation should be a lesson in how boards with responsibilities delegated by elected city councils and county commissioners could be improved.
By the time Hailey got what it called a surprise bill for $250,000 for dispatch services, the responsibility for implementing the countywide system had been delegated to a separate, non-elected board of directors called the Blaine County Communications Committee.
The committee is made up of police, firefighters and public administrators who did what they do best: make things work on the ground.
That was fine as far as it went, but the committee's operations apparently didn't extend to communicating with everyone who would be affected by the costs of operating a consolidated service.
Hailey, Bellevue and Carey said they were surprised. The Blaine County Commissioners said they were surprised that Hailey was surprised.
The public was surprised that anyone was surprised. For the public, no news was good news, which turned out to be bad news. But it wasn't entirely the committee's fault.
Idaho has no laws that set out how boards like the communications board, which is primarily funded by the county, should notify the public about what they're up to.
However, that doesn't mean that cities and counties themselves can't set up standards to ensure that the public can find out who is spending its money, and how and why it's being spent—before controversies like this one erupt.
At the very least, local elected officials should demand quarterly updates from organizations that spend substantial amounts of taxpayer money. They should require that updates be delivered at regularly noticed city or county meetings.
At best, elected officials should require all organizations that receive significant tax dollars, for example Ketchum's Community Development Corporation, its Urban Renewal Agency and, perhaps, the Sun Valley-Ketchum Chamber & Visitors Bureau, to publish notices of regular meetings and all agendas, and allow the public to be present at meetings.
Nothing cures a lack of communication like open meetings.
